Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

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> Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death.

They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.

Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates.

However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation.

Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died.

Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.

> blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation

Not to nitpick, but was Mao's China fascist, strictly speaking? I ask because the big 3 fascist regimes of the 20th century (Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain) were all stridently anti-communist, anti-collectivist, and anti-Marxist. You can see a lot of the other elements of many definitions of fascism in Mao's regime, but that anti-communist part is really hard to square. One definition I appreciated is that fascism is vocally and stridently anti-equality, and by that standard, Mao's regime is clearly not a fascist one, even as it just as strongly authoritarian as any self-described fascist regime.

I'm actually not prepared to say that communism or capitalism is more deadly, because I think the reality is that the people making decisions got to that place because of skill in political infighting, not superior judgement on the topic at hand.

That is, the reason planned economies do fail is not because planned economies must fail, per se. Rather economies are, of necessity, massively complicated things and its very difficult to account for every variable adequately whilst planning, to say nothing of the difficulty of conniving the appropriate carrots and sticks for every participant at every level, to convince all participants to follow the plan.

What fascism and most countries that have called themselves "communist" have in common is authoritarianism.

95% of what most Americans criticize as "the evils of communism" are, in fact, the evils of authoritarian systems; it just happens that the big authoritarian system that was in opposition to America for decades called itself communist. Much like North Korea calls itself "democratic".

And while fascism is, indeed, anti-equality, the inequality it seeks to foster is almost always between a cultural in-group and Everyone Else. Furthermore, fascism does not always seek to murder the Other; it also seeks to forcibly assimilate them.

Guess what Mao did in China: systematically eradicated massive swathes of Chinese culture—or rather, cultures, because there were many differences between what it meant to be, say, Han Chinese vs Mongolian or Tibetan. The Uyghur genocide that is ongoing today is just an extension of that—and yes, it fits quite well with fascist ideals.

Cuba is facing a famine right now. Communism was the cause of authoritarianism in china and the ussr. It's not possible to have a command economy run by humans without eventually having the leader be an authoritarian.

Capitalism did not cause people to be greedy, they were already greedy. Capitalism just embraces our nature and aligns incentives while communism pretends people can be changed to not follow incentives.

> Cuba is facing a famine right now

Because the US has embargoed Cuba for decades to cause hunger and desperation:

> If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06...

Citation needed on all your other claims.

Cuba is not embargoed by Canada, the EU, and so on, so the USA not providing food is certainly not a valid argument.

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/cuba/european-union-and-cuba_en?s....

The USA embargo in Cuba is not causing a famine because there is no famine. So you’re vitamin A deficiency did not cause your black eye, because you have enough vitamin B and C, and also you don’t have a black eye.

Also the embargo de jure excludes food and medicine (although de facto it is hard to export those to Cuba), but also subsidiaries of USA companies are also not allowed to trade with Cuba, so Canadian and EU companies which do business in the USA (which is almost everybody) are risking a lot by trading with Cuba, so in effect the embargo is somewhat extended by large parts of EU and Canada.

The parent to the post you responded to literally said

> Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.

I don’t know where you get your news from, but no. There is currently no famine happening in Cuba. There is a fuel shortage (like there is in many other countries). But there is still enough food for everybody, and (unlike in many other neighboring countries) the food is distributed such that hunger is relatively rare, and mass hunger—let alone a famine—is unheard of. The cost of living is still significantly lower than the median income, despite the energy crisis and despite the embargo.

I honestly don’t know where you’ve heard this. I searched the news for a famine in Cuba, and nothing came up, not even unreliable sources. Where did you hear this?

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